Waiting For The Heavens To Be Torn Open (Advent 1, Nov 27, 2011)

Homily:  Yr B Advent 1, November 30, 2008, Huntley

Readings:  Is 64:1-9;Ps 80:1-7,16-18; 1Cor 1:3-9; Mk 13:24-37

Advent is a time of waiting.  How many of you are good at waiting?  I know that I’m not.  As a society, I think that we’re much more used to rushing around and getting what we want when we want it than we are to waiting.  Waiting can seem like such a waste of time.  And yet, Simone Weil, the French writer, once wrote that “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life”.

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”  Our readings this morning all speak of a time of waiting, a time of waiting for God to act, a time of waiting for the divine to break into our midst like a light that pierces the darkness.  Sometimes, we think of waiting as passive, like the time we spend in the waiting lounge at the doctor’s office.  But the waiting that we engage in Advent is meant to be active, not passive.  Like the servants that wait for the master’s return, each has his work to do.  Advent waiting is meant to be a time of preparation, a time to get ready.  It is a time of longing and yearning that tests our patience.  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” cries the prophet in our reading from Isaiah.  ‘“How long” must we wait?’ echoes the psalmist.

Advent waiting is not passive, and neither is it about waiting from a place of comfort.  It’s one thing to wait for God’s coming when we’re comfortable.  It’s quite another to have to wait for God to act from a place of darkness, a place of exile, a place of desperation.  Many of us live our lives in apparent comfort, a comfort based in part on the consumption of a disproportionate and unsustainable amount of the earth’s resources.  We live in a cocoon, well insulated by our borders and our wealth and our legal system from the quiet desperation of the lives of so many on our planet.  But in Advent our spiritual journey demands that we dig deeper.  It forces us to acknowledge the darkness that we live in and to search for a response to the great pains of our day:  hunger, poverty, addiction, oppression, violence, disease. 

  

I’m reminded of a scene from one of the more recent Superman movies.  In it, Lois Lane has written a newspaper article, asking Superman to stay away, because the world has no need of a saviour.  In response, Superman takes Lois high up into the sky where she with him can hear the voices of all those who cry out, the hungry and the sick and the oppressed and the lonely.  “You say the world has no need of a saviour,” he tells her.  “But I hear the whole world crying out for salvation.”

And so we wait, not from a place of comfort, but from a place of darkness, acknowledging the darkness in the world around us, acknowledging the darkness in our own lives.  In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus, confronted with his own imminent death, uses the apocalyptic language found in the popular literature of the day to describe our plight.  “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven.”  In the midst of this darkness, we wait in patient expectation for the coming of a saviour; we wait for the light that enters the darkness and will not be overcome.

There is a tension in our waiting.  We are poised on a knife’s edge between hope and desperation, between patience and yearning, between expectation and not knowing what to expect.  This was the situation that the people of Israel found themselves in our first reading from Isaiah.

At one time, Israel had been a mighty kingdom under Kings David and Solomon.  But in the 6^th century BC, the southern kingdom of Judah had been defeated by the Babylonian empire, and the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and taken the people into exile.  It was a time of desolation, and a time of questioning.  Why has this happened?  Are we still God’s people? It was a time of waiting. 

Finally, when the people were allowed to return to Jerusalem, they found their home in ruins and the Temple devastated.  They were still oppressed.  They still felt abandoned.  And so the prophet and people turn to their God and cry out “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down”.  They called on God to stop hiding, to reveal himself and to save his people, just as he did in the days of Moses.

  

And you know what God’s response was?  We didn’t hear it in today’s reading but it follows immediately on in the 65^th chapter of the book of Isaiah.  God responds, “Hey I was here with you all along.  I was ready to be sought out, but no one asked, ready to be found, but no one looked.  I was calling out “Here I am, Here I am” but nobody noticed.

You see, the time of waiting isn’t meant simply to frustrate us, nor to push us to the edge of hope.  It’s meant to be a time of preparation, a time to get ready, a time of awakening to the spiritual dimension of our existence.  A time when we learn how to see God, so that when he does come into our midst, we don’t miss it.  Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.

God is coming into each of our lives, indeed he’s always coming into our lives, not in some distant future, but here and now among us. But his coming will be unexpected, like a thief in the night, like a master returning from a journey.  We don’t know when, we don’t know how, we don’t know what it will look like.  But when he does come, will you see?  Will you be awake?

Isaiah called for God to tear open the heavens and come down.  Six hundred years later, Mark’s gospel tells us that when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, the heavens were torn open and the Spirit of God came down like a dove upon him.  There was a great crowd gathered around.

How many people do you think saw it?  Most people didn’t. They missed it.  But John saw it, John who had been waiting for the coming of the Lord, John who had spent his life preparing the way of the Lord, John who did the work given to him in his time of waiting and yearning.  He was ready; he was awake.  He saw the heavens torn open and God come down.

It’s tempting sometimes for us to think of Advent and Christmas, the waiting for and the coming of God into our midst, as events that happened in the distant past.  And while I’d be the first to agree that the birth of Jesus was a singularly special moment in history, I also believe that the waiting for and the coming of God into our lives is always happening. 

Six years ago, I was a student chaplain in the Royal Ottawa Psychiatric Hospital, trying to learn to provide spiritual care to patients with severe mental illness.  Even though it was summer, it was an Advent time in my life. In the hospital I encountered despair and darkness that I had never encountered before in the lives of many men and women, and most of the time there wasn’t much I could do to help them.  In my own life, my wife  was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery (successfully as it turned out).  It was a time of waiting, a time of waiting for test results, a time of waiting for patients to stop their slide into despair and to show signs of a turnaround.  It was a time of praying, of pleading with God to do something.  But it was also a time of learning, of preparation, of doing the work that I’d been given to do.

On the floor where I was working, there was a woman who spent virtually the whole day moaning in a near catatonic state.  I had yet to go into her room, afraid I guess, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything for her.  One day, for whatever reason, I decided to go into her room and I sat beside her.  I tried talking to her but that didn’t get me too far. I tried just sitting in silence.  No apparent awareness that I was there.  I was just about to give up and leave when the idea came to me that I could try humming.  So I hummed a few bars of Amazing Grace.  And to my amazement, the woman stopped moaning, straightened a bit and started singing Amazing Grace in a beautiful clear voice.

On that same day, not long after, I was walking down the hall past the room of another woman who screamed non-stop.  Again, it was someone I’d never summoned up the courage to visit.  As I walked past, the screaming was particularly loud and agitated.  One of the nurses stormed out of the room, looked at me, and said “Go in there and do something.”  So, I walked through the doorway, glanced at the name on the way in, squatted down in front of the woman and said “Hi Angie.”  And again to my amazement, she stopped screaming, looked up at me and started talking to me calmly.  We talked a bit, and then I left.

  

That evening as I was driving home from the hospital, I had an overwhelming sense of a presence descending on me, and a feeling of intense emotion that brought tears to my eyes.  Luckily I was stopped at a red light at the time.  And I was instantly aware that I hadn’t brought that measure of peace and healing to those two women. For me in that moment, the heavens were torn open and God was with me.  That was for me a key moment in my spiritual journey.

Each of us is on our own, unique spiritual journey. It may look different for each one of us, but God is coming into each one of our lives, and into our midst as a community.  We wait in patient expectation for the coming of our Lord, for the moment when God will say to us “Here I am”.  When he comes, will we be awake or asleep?  Will we be ready? 

Amen.

Sheep, Goats and Gehenna (November 20, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Reign of Christ, Nov 20 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100; Eph 1:15-23; Mt 25:31-46

Sheep, Goats and Gehenna

In our gospel today Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats.  It’s his last chance.  It’s his last public speech, not by his own choice, but because later that day he would be arrested. It’s his final attempt to get his message across.

What’s the message?

Actually, it’s hard to miss.  It’s repeated four times.  We are called, we were created, we are commanded to respond to human need with loving service.  We must feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, give clothing to the naked, care for the sick, visit those in prison.  This list is repeated in its entirety four times in today’s reading.

So why is it that so often when I hear today’s gospel, I come away from it wondering about hell.

When I look at the text, I can see that today’s gospel is about, in order of importance:

First how we are to live, that is by responding to human need with loving service.

Second, about judgement, God’s Judgement.

And third, about the consequences of that judgement, the eternal fire and punishment that we call Hell.

However when we hear the gospel, often we turn things upside down.  We focus first of all on Hell, secondly on Judgement, and by that time we may be so preoccupied that we forget to even pay attention to the main point, that is, how God wants us to live our lives.

Why is that?  I think that it’s because many of us, many of us in the church, have unresolved issues with hell.  Because this notion that God will separate out the goats and send them to the eternal fire seems to be at odds with our theology of grace, at odds with our basic Christian understanding that God is a loving God, who accepts us as we are, forgives our sins and adopts us into his family as children.  How can we reconcile these things?

There is no doubt that Jesus is using extreme language and images in this text. It is after all his final shot at it.  If this were an email, IT WOULD BE ALL CAPS.  Jesus is shouting.  This is a wake-up call.  This is Jesus the prophet from Nazareth trying desperately to get people’s attention before it’s too late.

Why is he shouting? Because when he used a nice story like the story of the Good Samaritan to try to get his message across, we didn’t get it.  Because when he modelled the behaviour that he was calling us to, by feeding the hungry, by providing water for the woman at the well, be welcoming and eating with the prostitutes and tax collectors, by healing the sick and those who were in chains, by clothing the one who was naked, we still didn’t get it.

We live in a world where people are hungry and thirsty even though there is enough food and drink for all.  We live in a world where people are intentionally marginalized and made to feel unwelcome.  We live in a world where those who are sick and in prison are often isolated and lonely.  There are times when we respond to those needs with love.  Thank God for those who do.  But there are times when we don’t.  Why?  Sometimes it’s deliberate.  Sometimes it’s because we’re afraid, because we ourselves feel vulnerable. Sometimes it’s because we’re caught up in social structures and global systems that create injustice and suffering and we just don’t know what to do.  Sometimes it’s because we fail to see the needs around us, because we’re too busy or too focused on ourselves.

And Jesus says in today’s gospel “this will not stand”.  That God will not allow it to stand.  That God has promised to put the entire world right, showing up sin for what it is, judging it and destroying it so that it no longer has the power to infect his good creation.  That when God’s kingdom comes on earth there will be no more neglect of neighbour, there will be no more failure to respond to another’s need, there will be no more doing evil and injustice to one another.

That’s why in today’s gospel, Jesus talks about judgement and hell. 

And it does get our attention, at least in part because we have unresolved issues about hell.

  

Hell is something we don’t talk about much in the church, at least in the Anglican church.  In part that is because our common notion of hell is grounded in the picture that arose in the middle ages, in the writings of Dante and others, which in turn draw on images from Greek mythology.  The most common idea about hell in our culture is that it has something to do with the after-life, that when people die, that God will sort them into two lots, and the good people will go to heaven and the bad people will go to hell, a place of damnation and eternal punishment.  And that sort of picture makes many of us really uncomfortable, uncomfortable with the notion that a loving God would let some people end up in that sort of hell. 

So I think that it’s important to go back to our scriptures, to go back to the teaching of Jesus to try to understand what he meant when he uses the word “gehenna”, the Greek word that we translate as hell.

It’s a word that Jesus doesn’t use very often, recorded just a dozen times in the New Testament. 

If you look at these texts, mostly in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, you will notice a few things.

You will notice, first of all, that in Jesus teaching, the opposite of hell is not heaven, but life.  If you look at Jesus’ sayings, they mostly say that it is better to enter life than to go to hell.  The emphasis is not on life after death, but on life, now and in the future.  Sometimes Jesus will put this slightly differently.  He will say that it is better to enter the kingdom of God than to enter hell.  But remember, the kingdom of God is something that in other places, Jesus will say “has come near” or “is in your midst”.  Again, this isn’t just about an afterlife, he seems to be talking about a life that is both present and future.

And the word that we translate as hell is also revealing.  Gehenna, the word Jesus uses, is actually a place name.  It is the Hebrew name for the Valley of Hinnom which is found on the south west side of Jerusalem.  It is the garbage dump of the city of Jerusalem, the place where garbage from the city is dumped and burned, with a fire that burns day and night.  Not only is garbage dumped there, but sewage from the city also ends up in the Valley of Hinnom.  To make matters worse, child sacrifice used to be practiced there, because of this the valley had been condemned as an evil place by prophets such as Jeremiah. 

This is the word that Jesus uses for hell.  This is the actual place that his listeners envision when Jesus refers to eternal fire in today’s gospel.  Gehenna is the valley where evil, filth and garbage are sent to be destroyed in a fire that burns day and night.  Gehenna then, is a real place, a real garbage dump, which becomes the image of what God will do to destroy all that is evil and filthy, the eternal fire which burns all the garbage that has polluted God’s good creation.

This is the New Testament image of hell.  Hell is the place of fire which burns everything that opposes what God wants for the life of his people and his good creation.

Are people oppressed by war and violence?  To hell with war and violence.

Does a little child suffer from abuse?  To hell with child abuse.

Does someone you know suffer from addiction?  To hell with addictions.

Is there neglect of neighbour in our world?  To hell with it.

To hell with all these things that oppress us and prevent us from living life as God intended us to live.  Let them burn and be destroyed.

God wants us to enter into life, life as God intended us to live, the life that Jesus called life in the kingdom of God.  It is life that we can enter into here and now, but a life that has yet to be fully realized in our world today.  It is the life in which we love one another and care for those in need.

God’s judgement is this:  anything that prevents us from living the life that God is calling us to in his kingdom will not stand.  Neglect, abuse, injustice – all are garbage and they will burn in the fires of Gehenna, which we call hell.

If there is anything that is preventing you from living life as God intended, well to hell with it.  Jesus, in a passage from Mark, using the exaggeration typical of his culture, tells his disciples, even if it’s your foot that’s the preventing you from living life as God intended, well to hell with it - but don’t you go with it.  Better for you to enter life, to enter the Kingdom of God with only one foot.

Of course, it’s not our foot that’s the problem.  It’s all that other stuff we talked about, the net of sin and abuse and neglect and injustice that we all get ourselves caught up in.  It’s that net that God will judge and send to hell for destruction, so that we can be free to enter life, to enter the kingdom of God without being all tangled up in it, without being caught in it.

God wants us to be set free from whatever it is that’s preventing us from living the life we were created to live.  That is God’s judgement.  And that to me is good news.  It’s not something to be afraid of.  But it doesn’t mean that everything will be easy.  Repentance, change, transformation, getting untangled from the net, all that may be difficult, it may be painful, we may need help.

Luckily for us, the shepherd who knows how to distinguish between sheep and goats also knows how to find lost sheep.  In fact, Jesus says, that’s why he came.

And so back to the main point:

May we learn to love others as God has loved us.

Amen.

What are you going to do with your treasure? (Nov 13, 2011)

Homily:  Yr A P33, Nov 13 2011, St. Albans

Readings:  Judges 4:1-7, Ps 123; 1 Thess 5:1-11; Mt 25:14-30

What are you going to do with your treasure?

What would you do if someone handed you $5 million?  In the parable that we just heard, that’s the amount that’s entrusted to the first slave, when we translate it into our currency.  That’s a lot of money.  Interestingly enough, this same parable is found in the gospel of Luke with much smaller amounts of money, but in Matthew’s version he’s cranked it up.  The amounts involved have increased dramatically.  Matthew wants to make sure we get the point.  But what point?

What would you do if someone walked up to you and cut you a cheque for $5 million dollars, and said I’m going away for a while, look after this for me while I’m gone?

It’s a fortune.  It’s a sum that’s extremely valuable.  It’s enough to buy a mansion, a fancy car, and still have a guaranteed pension and spending money left over.  That much money is not only valuable but it’s also extremely powerful.  You’d have the power to hire people, to buy a company, to start a business.

What would you do with it?

I suppose it might depend on what you thought the master intended when he entrusted the money to you.  At the time when Jesus told this parable, there was a rabbinic tradition that commended burial as a way of safeguarding money.  There were no banks backed by government issued deposit insurance in those days.  So burying those gold coins in the ground made a lot of sense, especially if you were entrusted with safeguarding someone else’s fortune.

The third slave decided to bury the $1 million that he had been given.  Apparently that was the wrong decision.  He ends up in the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It seems that the master entrusted the money to the three slaves not for the purpose of safeguarding, but rather for the purpose of doing business.  But what sort of business are we talking about?

  

I don’t think this parable has anything to do with money.  And I don’t think that it has anything to do with talents, our gifts and aptitudes, even though it has often been interpreted that way.

In order to understand this parable, we need to figure out what it is that the $5 million dollars represents.  What have you and I been entrusted with that is valuable and powerful beyond all expectation?

Matthew gives us a clue in the text.  And that clue is the word which we translated as entrusted.  The master entrusted his property to the slaves.  In Greek the word is “paradoken”, meaning literally “handed over”.  But in the Jewish context of the first century, paradoken was a technical term for the handing over of the “tradition”, that is the Law and the Prophets, the Jewish religious tradition from one generation to the next.

For Matthew, that huge treasure of $5 million dollars can mean only one thing:  the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus.  This is our treasure, this is the gospel of extreme value that has been entrusted to us.  It’s this gospel which is so powerful, so powerful that Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that the gospel is power of God for salvation.

This is the treasure that has been handed over to us.  We have been entrusted with the gospel of God’s grace, recorded in our scriptures and tradition, lived out in our community in relationship with God and with God’s Spirit in our midst.  God has chosen us and loves us and adopts us as his children.  This is the gift that we’ve been entrusted with.

So what should we do with it?

Should we keep it safe, protect it, hide it in a hole in the ground?

Or, should we go out and be entrepreneurs and double our money?

Some of you are still young and single, and go on dates from time to time, and so I want you to imagine yourselves in this scenario.  Imagine that you’re dating this man or woman, and things are going well, and you kind of like this person and want things to go somewhere.

Then one evening when you’re out having dinner in this romantic spot, it finally happens.  You’re date tells you that he or she loves you and that he or she will always love you.

How are you to respond?  Well suppose you respond as follows:  suppose you said to your date,

“That’s awesome.  Could you please put that in writing?”  And you whip out a pen and paper and make your date write down what he or she just said.  Then you write down your response, saying that you also love him or her, and then you drag your bewildered date off to the notary public office, have the declarations notarized and stamped, then rush to the bank and put them in the deposit box for safekeeping.  Finally, you turn to your date, and say, “this has been a wonderful evening, goodbye,” and you turn and return home on your own. 

Sharing the story with your roommate later that evening, your roommate waits until you’ve finished speaking, and then says, “I think you missed the point”.

If we receive the treasure of the gospel, the treasure of God’s grace, God’s love for us, and we bury it for safekeeping, we’ve missed the point.

But so often isn’t that what we do?

We are children of the Enlightenment, and as part of that heritage, we have over the last three hundred years turned our faith largely into a matter of intellectual assent.  It’s what we believe, the same way as we believe that 2 + 2 = 4.  And in so doing, we have, like the third slave, buried our treasure and missed the point.  Good news is not to be recorded, it’s not supposed to be turned into dogma, it is to be proclaimed.  Grace, God’s love for us, is not to be duly noted, it is to be received and in turn poured out to those around us.

Let me tell you another story, a true story this time, of two Jewish communities which existed in the second half of the first century AD.  The first is the community of Matthew, likely located in Antioch, the community out of which the Gospel of Matthew which we read this morning was written and proclaimed.  The second community is the community of the Didache, also a community of Jewish Christians.  Both of these communities received the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But the community of the Didache took what they received, took what had been handed over to them and built walls around it.  They drew up boundaries of identity.  They were fearful of outsiders who might change or dilute the tradition.  They wanted to preserve the Jewish traditions, the dietary laws, circumcision and so on.

Matthew’s community, on the other hand, took what had been entrusted with them and they shared it with the non-Jewish world.  They removed the requirement for circumcision, changed the dietary laws, moved the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.  All of these were risky things to do in a Jewish community back in the first century.  They were persecuted for it, kicked out of the synagogue.  But Matthew’s community was a community of good and faithful servants.  Theirs was a living tradition.  They had received the grace of God and they were so excited by it that they wanted to pour out that grace to the gentile world around them, and so they took risks and lived lives of faith and they doubled, and tripled and quadrupled their money.  The result of these two different approaches?  The community of the Didache has disappeared, and its text the Didache is read on an occasional basis by a handful of academics and students of history and theology.  And Matthew’s community?  It’s going strong. We are the descendants of Matthew’s community, and their text, the Gospel of Matthew was read by billions of people around the world just this morning. 

We have been entrusted with the most valuable and most powerful treasure in all the universe, the gospel of Jesus Christ which proclaims God’s love for us.

What are we going to do with it?

Are we going to give it our intellectual assent and then store it in a safe place somewhere?

Are we going to hide it in the ground out of fear that we may lose it, or build walls around it to protect it and keep it safe?

Or will we be good and faithful servants?  Will we take this treasure that we’ve been given and get to work, proclaiming the good news, taking risks, manifesting God’s grace to those we meet, grabbing hold of our treasure with an entrepreneurial spirit and doing business with it?

Will we take our treasure in our hands and use it, share it, invest it, and be creative with it?  How will we release the power of the gospel to do its work in our community, in our neighbourhood, in our city?  Will we double our money?  Triple it?  Quadruple it?

Do you know what a treasure you have been entrusted with?  And what are you going to do with it, good and faithful servant?

Amen.